Angle of Attack

The summer internship program at FlightAware gives students the opportunity to apply what they've learned in the classroom to real engineering challenges while giving our engineers the chance to mentor the next generation of technology leaders. Last summe

One of FlightAware's main goals is to put flight data into context to tell a broader, interconnected story about a flight, airport, or other part of the aviation ecosystem. One of the ways we do that best across all our product surfaces is by presenting i

Three years ago, I wrote a post offering insight into how broad engineering decisions are made at FlightAware; specifically, it covered my thought process behind recommending a language we should unify behind for micro-service development. With this post,

The title is a nod to The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. But it might also be a nod to the wagging tail of a purple and white terrier named Bits.Our Current StateAt FlightAware, we use two different observability platforms, our in-h

We're republishing this blog post to refresh your memories in preparation for an upcoming retrospective post on how our adoption of microservices has progressed in the last 3 years, and whether I would have made a different recommendation with the power o

Nearly six years ago, I wrote a post outlining how FlightAware was embarking on a journey to implement Site Reliability Engineering. The post focused on the transformation of our incident response processes to bring structure to the response as well as im

FlightAware shares a lot of flight data - you can search on our website and see information about flights that are taking place almost anywhere in the world, stretching back for years. Sometimes, though, we block flights from public view, often at the req

In October 2024, we released AuthNxt-our next-generation authentication platform designed to integrate seamlessly with both our legacy TCL monolith and our modern microservices. This move was the product of months of planning, designing, building, testing

When we first shared our move to a monorepo, our goal was to simplify dependency management, align tooling, and ship faster. A year later, that foundation has grown into the standard way the Web Wing builds. We've added more apps, introduced custom Nx too

Discovering Design Beyond AestheticsWhen I first started my career in engineering, I thought design strictly meant aesthetics. It was about colors, alignment, and polish. I used to think of design as something to implement, not something to participate in